There are things in the Black community we do not talk about. Mental health is at the top of that list. I grew up watching that silence play out in my own family. My mother and I have never been close, and for a long time I told myself that was just how things were. It took years for me to understand that what I was watching was not simply distance. It was a woman carrying weight that she had never been given the tools to put down. In a community that teaches you to pray through it, push through it, and keep moving no matter what, struggling mentally is treated as weakness. So, people suffer quietly. Families drift apart. Children grow up confused about why the person who was supposed to be closest to them feels like a stranger. And nobody talks about why. That silence shaped me more than I realized for a long time. Growing up without that closeness with my mother left a hole that I did not have language for as a kid. I just knew something was off. I knew other kids had something with their parents that I did not have, some ease, some warmth, some foundation that I was building without. As I got older, I started to understand that what I had witnessed was not a personal rejection. It was a person who had never been taught how to process pain, how to ask for help, or how to be vulnerable in a world that had never rewarded her for it. The Black community raised her the same way it raised so many of us. Be strong. Keep going. Handle it yourself. Do not let them see you struggle. That is a heavy way to live. And it costs more than people admit. When I started to feel the weight myself, the pressure of being a first generation college student, navigating a career in tech where I rarely saw anyone who looked like me, facing a job market that felt like it was designed to keep certain people out, I defaulted to everything I had been taught. Push through it. Stay quiet. Do not let it show. For a while that worked, or at least it looked like it worked from the outside. But suppressing things does not make them disappear. It just delays the moment they resurface, and they always resurface, usually at the worst possible time and in ways that affect everything around you. I started to notice it in how I moved through the world. The way I isolated when things got hard instead of reaching out. The way I normalized stress levels that were not normal. The way I treated exhaustion as a personality trait instead of a signal that something needed to change. None of that came out of nowhere. It came from watching the adults around me treat their own pain the same way and never seeing a different model. What eventually shifted my thinking was a simple but uncomfortable realization. The way I had been taught to handle pain was not strength. It was survival. And there is a real difference between the two. Strength means actually addressing what is hurting you, sitting with it, understanding it, and working through it with intention. Survival is just making it to the next day without falling apart. I had been surviving my whole life when I deserved to actually be healing. The stigma around mental health in the Black community is not accidental. It is rooted in generations of people who had to appear unbreakable because vulnerability was never safe. Showing weakness meant being taken advantage of. Asking for help meant admitting you could not handle what life handed you. That armor was built for a reason. But armor has a cost. It keeps things out and it keeps things in, and eventually the weight of carrying it becomes its own kind of damage. I see that damage in my family. I see it in my community. I see it in the statistics showing that Black Americans are significantly less likely to seek mental health treatment despite facing disproportionate levels of trauma, poverty, discrimination, and stress. We are expected to be resilient without ever being given space to recover. And the people who fall apart under that expectation are often blamed for their own breaking. My mother deserved better than that. So, did I. So does every Black child growing up right now who is watching a parent struggle and being taught by silence that this is just how things are. I want to be part of changing that. I want younger Black men and women to grow up in a world where therapy is as normal as going to the doctor. Where saying I am not okay is met with support instead of shame. Where mothers do not have to carry everything alone and children do not spend years trying to understand a distance, they never had words for. Where the standard response to pain is not just push through it but actually let us work through this together. This scholarship would support someone who has lived inside that silence and come out the other side with a clear vision for what needs to change. Healing is not a luxury. It is the foundation that everything else gets built on. A better career, a stronger community, a healthier family, none of it is sustainable without it. I am not just pursuing a degree. I am pursuing a version of myself that finally has permission to be whole. And I believe that work, done honestly and out loud, is exactly the kind of thing the world needs more of right now.

I want to build a bridge. Not a physical one, but the kind that connects people to opportunities they never knew existed. Growing up in Antioch, Tennessee, I watched talented, intelligent people get left behind simply because they did not have access to the right resources, the right networks, or the right technology. That gap between potential and opportunity is what I have dedicated my life to closing. The most concrete thing I am building right now is my Master’s degree in Computer Science with a concentration in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Western Governors University. But the degree itself is not the end goal. It is the foundation for everything I actually want to create. I am working toward building AI driven tools and software systems that serve communities like the one I come from, places where technology is often something that happens to people rather than something built for them or by them. I have worked in IT support, gaining hands on experience that taught me something no textbook could: the people most affected by technology are rarely the ones who get a seat at the table when it is being designed. I want to change that. The systems I build will be created with underserved communities in mind from the very beginning, not added as an afterthought. Beyond the technical work, I am building something personal. I am constructing a version of myself that my younger self could look up to. Being a first generation college student means there was no blueprint, no family member who had done this before me. Every milestone I reach creates a new data point for someone behind me who might be wondering if this path is even possible for someone like them. That is not something I take lightly. I also want to build mentorship pipelines for Black and first generation students pursuing STEM. Representation in technology is not just a feel good talking point. It directly affects whose problems get solved and whose do not. By staying visible, staying accessible, and investing in the next generation, I can help ensure that the future of technology includes the voices and experiences that have historically been excluded. The job market in tech has been brutal. Breaking in as a first generation Black student without connections or a financial cushion is genuinely hard, and I have felt that weight firsthand. This scholarship would ease that pressure and allow me to stay focused on building the skills and credentials that will get me where I am going. I am not just trying to build a career. I am trying to build something that outlasts me.